Well that's one thing to do with tampons; in recent features, Heston Blumenthal has been touting tampons as the next innovative culinary technique. In a feature "My Life on a Plate" in the Guardian, Blumenthal spills that one of his lunches at the lab is yogurt and tampons.

"We were testing the effect of certain foods and how they coat the palate for an interactive presentation. The tampon dries the saliva out between spoonfuls, so you can identify how the tongue perceives flavour. It did work, but I wonder how it will go down," he writes.

Unused, a tampon is just a really absorbent material, Blumenthal argues, and "if you drain the moisture in your mouth you experience richness, creaminess, and sweetness more intensely and there is really nothing more absorbing than a tampon," he explained to the Guardian.

Luckily, the Guardian reports that Blumenthal won't be serving yogurt and tampons in his restaurants anytime soon, as it's more for research purposes than anything else. Apparently, the idea was introduced to Blumenthal by oral physiologist Don Prince at a food research center in the Netherlands, and now the two have been experimenting with different tampon brands and sizes. "You sit there and it grows and sucks the moisture out and just gets quite wet, swollen, and woolly. Although it is quite funny sitting there with the little string coming out of your mouth," Blumenthal said. Palate cleanser, nose bleed stopper, what's next for the humble tampon?